When the meeting broke up, he made a point of coming to her side.
“Well, Captain Serrano . . . I never had the pleasure of meeting you before.” This close, the strong face with its bright green eyes had a raffish charm. His skin was a shade lighter than her own; his hair, clipped short, might have been any shade of brown. “My misfortune, I must say. Of course I heard—your family has branches everywhere, it seems.”
Heris decided there was no advantage to be gained by pretense. “Isn’t calling one cruiser and two patrols a battle group a bit much?” His eyes widened a moment, then narrowed as he grinned, squeezing the light from their green until they looked almost black.
“Surely you don’t feel an obligation to explain,” he began. Heris said nothing. “I thought it would reassure the locals,” he went on. “Convince them they weren’t forgotten. There’s not likely to be anything much here—certainly nothing to justify a real battle group—and if this satisfies them—”
Heris shrugged as if she didn’t care, and glanced around the compartment. “I merely commented. If there were veterans here, for instance . . . they might say something.”
“Barring you, I don’t expect to find any veterans. Xavier apparently sent few recruits to Fleet, and those old enough to retire chose more populous worlds. Not that I blame them.”
“It’s not a bad place,” Heris said, more to draw him out than in serious argument. She found it more than interesting that he had bothered to check on Xavier’s recruitment to Fleet, and where its veterans went.
“You think not?” Garrivay’s mobile face drew itself into a knot of distaste. “I hate ag worlds, myself. Dirty, backward, half of them free-birthers whose discontented spawn scrabble for a way offplanet and clog the ranks of unskilled labor hanging around spaceports. I like to eat as much as anyone, but we could subsist quite well without them.”
His venom surprised her; she wondered what had given him a dislike for ag worlds. Had he come from one? “It has strategic importance, at least,” she said.
“If the Black Scratch is crazy enough to attack through here, I’m not going to be able to stop them,” Garrivay said. “Surely you don’t think they will? It would be a very inefficient approach—”
“There’s the Spinner jump point,” Heris said. She had trouble keeping the edge out of her voice; he was treating her as if she were a combination of crazy and crony.
“That!” He waved his hand. “Fleet’s got a couple of battle groups on the other side—the Black Scratch can’t take it, and they must know that.”
Heris opened her mouth to protest this obvious idiocy and stopped. Why reveal herself? “I suppose,” she said, and added, as if without thought, “They used to have just a single cruiser—”
He relaxed a little; she recognized the shift in his facial muscles. “Ah . . . no wonder you worried. Of course you wouldn’t know the current dispositions.” That had a half-heard question mark on it, which she ignored.
“So you’re just here to show the flag, as it were?”
“Something like that. Perhaps snag another raider.” He grinned at her. He had a good grin, one she might have liked if she hadn’t known all the rest. “By the way, I didn’t mean to slight your accomplishment in there. Going after a raider—even a shoddy thing like that—with a rich lady’s yacht took guts. And you couldn’t know how incompetent the raider was until afterwards. . . .” Again, the hint of a question. Heris smiled blandly.
“No . . . to tell you the truth, I was more than half expecting to be blown away myself. The only advantage of being small is that you’re hard to detect in the first place, and hard to hit in the second.”
“Lucky for you the raider had no decent weaponry. Did he get off even one shot?”
“A couple,” Heris said, sticking to the facts that would have been reported by the distant watcher. “But inaccurate—as you say, he had no decent weaponry. He just looked dangerous.”
“And these poor sods have been paying tribute to that sort of trash. Well, I can take care of that. Tell me, how long do you plan to be in the system?”
“I don’t know.” Heris frowned as if it bothered her. “Lady Cecelia is visiting bloodstock farms; I think she expects to find the perfect horse genes somewhere and go back into eventing.”
“And you have to hang around until your owner is through? Lucky you. It’s almost like being back in Fleet, isn’t it?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “Hanging around waiting on someone else’s bright ideas. Of course, your owner’s a Rejuvenant . . . she has plenty of time.”
Interesting. He didn’t know she owned the ship herself. It wouldn’t have been big news, not with everything else going on, but he might have picked it out of the datanet if he’d looked for it. Would she, in his place? Of course. On the other hand, never assume the enemy is stupid . . . perhaps he was just sounding her out. “I suppose so . . . but so are many admirals, aren’t they?”
“True enough.” He sighed. “I don’t suppose you could lend me your onboard weaponry . . . beef up this old clunker they’ve got here, use it as a decoy or something . . . ?”
“Sorry,” Heris said, not sorry at all. “It’s not much, and you’d have to take the hull apart to get it out anyway—you can’t imagine what it took to get it installed in the first place. Anyway, since Lady Cecelia paid for it, I suppose it’s really hers. Of course you could confiscate the whole ship, if it’s really an emergency. . . .”
“Oh no, nothing like that. Although if your employer is nervous, I would advise you to get her out of here.”
“I’ll speak to her,” Heris said. That pleased him; his eyelid flickered. He wanted her gone; he wanted her weapons gone. What was he up to? She itched to get back to Koutsoudas and his scans; she was ready to throw roses all over her aunt admiral and even Arash Livadhi. With any luck—and Koutsoudas made his own—he would have the probes in place and she would soon have an ear in this fellow’s private counsels.
“There’s never been a suspicion of treason,” Koutsoudas said when she told him about the conversation. “Overzealousness, misinterpretation of orders allowing him more leeway . . . but nothing to harm the Familias.”
“Adding to the mess at Patchcock harmed the Familias,” Heris said. “There’s more than one way to cause trouble.”
“I . . . hadn’t thought of that.” Koutsoudas looked taken aback; Heris grinned to herself. She had begun to wonder if the man was a genius at everything.
“We’re one of the logical places for the Benignity to strike. You’re sure there was a watcher out there when we took that raider—” Something that had bothered her while talking to Garrivay now surfaced. “And he called them the Black Scratch.”
Koutsoudas’s eyebrows went up. “So? Everybody knows that nickname.”
“Everybody knows it, but . . . think, ’Steban. Did you ever hear Arash use it during a briefing? I know I never did. It’s slang, and this may be war.”
“Now that you mention it . . . no. Commander Livadhi always said the Benignity, or the Compassionate Hand.” And Koutsoudas, for the first time, referred to Livadhi by his rank, not his position as captain. Interesting.
“You think he’s turned,” Petris said. It was not a question.
“I think . . . yes. I do. And I have no proof, and no one to tell . . . not within any range that would help.”
“Does he know what you think?”
“No. He shouldn’t. I played stupid for all I was worth. Accepted his judgment that the raider was almost harmless—” Ginese growled something incomprehensible at that, and Heris let herself chuckle. “Oh yes, he did. He knew about the mismatched drive/hull fit, too, which none of us told him.”